*****

This is my personal favorite of the entire BOND film series. It is the best cast and directed and it has the best screenplay. It also contains my favorite John Barry BOND soundtrack. This film has the finest villains and one of the best Bond Girls with Honor Blackman's Pussy Galore and one of the best Bond Beauties with Shirley Eaton's Jill Masterson. Speaking of beauties, this film sports the incredibly sexy Aston Martin DB5, among the greatest designed automobiles ever. This car is also the slickest of the BOND gadgets. Is it any wonder that Pierce Brosnan's Agent 007 is still driving this fantastic machine? GOLDFINGER has the best title tune, which is sung by the incomparable Shirley Bassey. Sean Connery's finest performance as Bond can be found here as well. With all of these great ingredients, what could possibly go wrong???

Even though this film has a brilliant plot, the screenwriters fumble when it comes to the final scenes. In short, this attempted skyjacking is so ridiculous and so obviously cobbled together that it begs for improvement. A final chase would have sufficed with James Bond rescuing Pussy Galore from Auric Goldfinger's clutches. OK, so I'm old fashioned, but at least this would have played out better than what we're given here. Besides, the film needs one more action set-piece since its running time is only 111 minutes. The only good thing that can be said about the finale in GOLDFINGER is that it is very brief.

The screenwriters also fail to convince when they have Pussy Galore switch sides after a romp in the hay with Bond. Let's be honest here: this scene is borderline rape. Bond is supposed to be a charmer with the ladies not a molesting monster. Besides, Pussy Galore is one tough cookie, not a lovesick schoolgirl! Come on!! She can throw men over her shoulder, fly an airplane plus she is a crack shot. Is this any way to treat a woman of her caliber? Of course not! The writers should be horsewhipped for this balderdash and if I had a horse I would do it. To make matters worse, the screenplay for the next BOND film ( THUNDERBALL ) actually has the villainess speak some lines that only highlight the ludicrousness of having Bond use his sexual prowess to make a bad girl turn her back on her nefarious ways and become good. Enough!

But where the screenwriters get it right is in their vast improvement over the novel's gold heist. Instead of actually removing all the gold from Fort Knox as Fleming wrote it, the film presents a superior master plan for Goldfinger: contaminate our entire gold supply with a small nuclear "device." It is very interesting that by the end of the Sixties, our entire economic system was completely off the gold standard. Very curious indeed. But one plot point that should have stayed within the film's screenplay concerns Bond's hidden note to alert the CIA about the dawn raid on Fort Knox. Although the actual circumstances were different in the novel, Bond actually succeeded here. But in the film, what we get instead is a extended and gratuitous sequence involving the crushing of a very dead Mr. Solo inside a black Lincoln Continental. So James Bond's hidden note inside Mr. Solo's pocket, which is wrapped around the Q Branch miniature electronic tracker, never reaches our government. What ultimately saves the day in this film adaptation is the aforementioned sex-capades between 007 and Miss Galore. Yeah. Right. Whatever.

Speaking of saving the day, the screenwriter's really should have had Agent 007 actually disarm Goldfinger's bomb instead of the desperate nonsense he goes through during this scene. In fact, this BOND film presents us with a rather klutzy 007 throughout the story. After all, Bond's recklessness gets both Masterson sisters killed, his Aston Martin DB5 smashed and he very nearly detonates a small nuclear bomb inside Fort Knox. Blimey! One reviewer at the time actually cited this as one of the key elements to the film's success: the audience can identify with a somewhat bumbling secret agent. Too bad the writers make James Bond just a smarmy superman in the next film. But this is much more preferable than making Bond just a silly clown, which the Roger Moore incarnation tends to do more often than not. But I digress.

Still, what sets this BOND film apart from the rest is that overall, it tends to be quite a class act. The narrative takes its time to build up and the action set-pieces, especially the Fort Knox raid and Bond's battle with Oddjob, are so well directed and executed. Almost all of the rest of the BOND villains pale in comparison to Gert Frobe's Auric Goldfinger. This actor is perfectly cast in this role and he matches the novel's description exactly. Even though Gert Frobe's actual voice is dubbed by another actor, his performance is equal to Sean Connery's. But all of their scenes together are so well written and acted, especially the golf match sequence and the scene with the industrial laser threatening Bond. Connery and Frobe are having a grand old time and it shows. They really are a joy to watch.

There has never been and there never will be a better henchman in the BOND film series than Harold Sakata's Oddjob. Honor Blackman's Pussy Galore is the ideal Bond Girl: smart, strong, athletic, and ....... sexy! This class of Bond Girl won't be matched until three films later with actress Diana Rigg -- but small wonder: like Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg cut her teeth on THE AVENGERS spy series on British television. All in all, GOLDFINGER represents a kind of pinnacle for the JAMES BOND film series. The only place the series could go -- other than to maintain this high level of excellence overall -- was downhill. With the next two JAMES BOND film installments, it does just that ....... unfortunately.